1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data objects, and more particularly to a system and method for organizing, storing, and/or transporting multi-presentation content. In one implementation, the invention may be implemented using an extensible markup language, as shown by the disclosure of OmniViewXML given below.
2. Description of the Related Art
Over the years, various public and proprietary standards have arisen for storing and transporting multimedia information. As one example, numerous standards for lossy data compression and storage of full-motion video have been produced by the Motion Picture Experts Group of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). These standards are collectively referred to as “MPEG.” Different MPEG standards have evolved for different purposes, including MPEG-1 dealing primarily with audio and video compression for CD-ROM applications, MPEG-2 for more demanding applications including broadcasting, MPEG-3 for high-definition television, and MPEG-4 for distance learning, remote monitoring, home shopping, and other applications using slower transmission methods such as conventional phone lines.
From the standpoint of storing and transporting multimedia data, the MPEG format certainly does the job. For example, when used to encode a closed-captioned movie, an MPEG-formatted data object will include the diverse multimedia formats of video, audio corresponding to the video, and text matching the audio.
Although the MPEG standards serve the foregoing applications well, there are less aptly suited for other applications such as rapidly compiling varying data content at outlying sites and transmitting the data content for decomposition at a central facility. Such applications demand extensibility, presentation independence, and easy modification of encoded data. The MPEG standards are not “extensible” because their requirements are fixed, and users therefore cannot modify them. The MPEG standards do not yield presentation independence, because MPEG data objects are intended for presentation by a specific output device, such as WINDOWS compatible personal computer. The MPEG standards do not enable users to easily modify MPEG data, rather the underlying data must be changed and re-encoded into the MPEG format. The MPEG standards, then, do not provide the universality required of some applications requiring rapid assimilation transmission, and decomposition of data content.
In more direct consideration of the foregoing needs, the International Press Telecommunications Council developed NewsML, the News Markup Language. NewsML purports to be an XML based, media independent, structural framework for news, and aims to represent news in all the various stages of its life cycle in an electronic service environment. NewsML is intended for use in electronic news production, archiving, and delivery. With NewsML, no assumption is made about the media type, format, or encoding of news. It is said to provide a structure within which pieces of news media relate to each other, and may equally contain text, video, audio, graphics, and photos. NewsML takes the view that any medium can be the main part of a news-item, and that objects of all other types can fulfill secondary, tertiary, and other roles in respect of the main part. Hence, NewsML is said to allow for the representation of simple textual news-items, textual news-items with primary and secondary photos, the evening TV news with embedded individual reports, and so on.
Although NewsML enjoys growing commercial use today, and may even be satisfactory for many news reporting applications, software engineers at INDICAST CORPORATION (“INDICAST”) have sought improvements over NewsML and other markup languages. INDICAST software engineers have discovered that the existing markup languages are insufficient to convey the particular types of information required to provide INDICAST with multi-view content. Chiefly, there is no community or commercial standard for storing or transporting identical information in different forms such as audio, a textural transcription of the audio, a short form text rendition summarizing the story, video, a graphics image, and cataloging metadata for organizing, storing, and searching the information. Therefore, as a particular example, content consumers such as voice portals receive content in different forms, at different times, and there is no correspondence between an audio story and the textual transcription of that story. This creates significant work in assembling and associating different presentations of the same story that arrive separately.
Consequently, known data storage/transportation formats are not completely adequate for these applications due to certain unsolved problems.